Is this a good idea?

So I've got these 2 sites that have been around a long time, and actually got quite a lot of natural backlinks from other real sites. But their rankings have dropped over time.

So I'm thinking, instead of building new tier 1 links from scratch, why not just treat the ones I already have as tier 1, and then continue from there?

Site 1's links are mostly from forums, thousands upon thousands of forum posts on various domains, a large number of which are in foreign languages.

Site 2's links are mostly sidebar links on random people's personal web 2.0 blogs and a couple other sites and a few forums.

Can I consider these as tier 1? How many links would be a reasonable amount to give each one, to stay safe?

I've never actually used any mass backlinking tools before in my life ever, so I guess I just want to make sure I'm not gonna do a bad thing here.

What would you guys do?

1) Why do you want to do mass backlinking? You won't get anywhere this way.

2) Filter your backlinks. The high qualiy ones use them for Tier 1, spammy links > disavow.

3) Diversify your backlink portfolio. Try some PBN, guest posts, make sure you get links from all famous social networks (fb, twitter, pinterest etc)

4) Keep your blog alive, publish posts often

This can be a good start...

1) Why do you want to do mass backlinking? You won't get anywhere this way.

Click to expand...

I was thinking it would strengthen the links I already have...? Or at least just the best ones out of them. That's gonna be a big sorting job.

I will definitely also get links from other sources as well, but just thought this might be a bit of a shortcut to the whole web 2.0 tiers thing.

Yes you should take the time to do this cleanup. Is needed. Use ahref/majestic to check and filter backlinks. They offer great tools.